Travelure
By Hugh & Colleen Gantzer
We discovered a wonderful old word: HAPPENSTANCE. It means something pleasant that occurs just by chance. This is how it happened.
Fed up with the food produced by our domestic staff, we decided to splurge for the next week or ten days. We chose to get all our meals from The Fern-Brentwood Resort. Our meals were crafted by Chef Navin Negi. He had left his home in Chamba in Tehri Garhwal and joined the Food Craft Institute in Dehradun. He gave us delectable fare from Nettle soup, Old Fashioned Tomato Basil Soup, through Fried Fish and Tartar Sauce, Chicken Chettinad, Laccha Paratha, Chicken Biryani to Gulkand Gulab Jamun and a whole range of other delectable sweets and puddings. This feast was worth every rupee we paid for it.
Then came the happenstance.
Talking to the General Manager of the Resort, Arindam Bahel, we were delighted to learn that it is dedicated to sustaining its green image and fighting Climate Change. It recycles and reduces the creation of waste in every way it can. Here are some of the things it does.
Its toilet tissues, paper napkins and very attractive takeaway food containers are all made from bagasse: the fibrous pulp that remains after the juice has been extracted from sugarcane. Bio-degradable wood has replaced dangerous plastic in such items as a Shaving Kit, combs and toothbrushes. Arindam told us that the preferred wood is from slaughtered rubber trees. When a rubber tree has yielded all its white latex fat, it dies. Its wood is then waste. This biodegradable waste wood is the preferred material for the wooden toothbrushes. Room slippers are made of jute. Plastic water bottles have been replaced by reusable glass bottles. This saves about 60,000 plastic bottles once added to the non bio-degradable waste from this one hotel.
The laundry of a hotel consumes a great amount of water – much of this is quite unnecessary. People who live in their own homes do not change their bed sheets, pillow cases and towels every day. So why should this be done if they stay in a hotel? Guests who live in Brentwood for more than a day have the option to ask the hotel’s housekeeping staff to change their linen every second day. This, clearly, results in an enormous saving of water and also gives the guest the assurance that they have been eco-friendly.
If our Government gave an incentive to all hospitality establishments to adopt such eco-friendly methods, it would make a substantial impact against the Ogre of Climate Change.
Finally, we moved away from Brentwood to a hotel owned by another acquaintance. Ashish Goel is the Boss of Vishnu Palace Hotel. It is at the other end of the Mall to Brentwood. Ashish recently invested in a machine which should interest all owners of large catering establishments and many others who produce bio-degradable waste. Kitchen waste is often trenched allowing bacteria which is present in both the atmosphere and soil to degrade, or break it up into substances which plants can feed on. But this process can take many months and is affected by temperature, humidity and chemicals present in the soil. The machine, apparently, takes care of these problems by working without trenching the waste. Once the waste is filled into the machine it churns it clockwise and anti-clockwise at the ideal temperature to cause the bacteria to feed on the kitchen waste and multiply. This is also the process used in a Sewage Treatment Plant. In those STPs, the sewage is rotated causing it to be digested by bacteria much faster than it would have been in a traditional septic tank. Ashish assured us that he has used the compost that the machine produces in his garden, but he neither manufactures the machine nor sells it.
Ashish Goel, can be contacted at Vishnu Palace Hotel, Mussoorie – Phone;081 09412050244.
And may HAPPY HAPPENSTANCES favour you.
(Hugh & Colleen Gantzer hold the National Lifetime Achievement Award for Tourism among other National and International awards. Their credits include over 52 halfhour documentaries on national TV under their joint names, 26 published books in 6 genres, and over 1,500 first-person articles, about every Indian state, UT and 34 other countries. Hugh was a Commander in the Indian Navy and the Judge Advocate, Southern Naval Command. Colleen is the only travel writer who was a member of the Travel Agents Association of India.) (The opinions and thoughts expressed here reflect only the authors’ views!).
